Jacqueline Farias has spent the last five years as a barista at Merit Coffee in Highland Park while working her way through Texas Woman’s University.
It’s not unusual for 400 customers to pass through during a shift. That’s a lot of pouring, sweeping and wiping. Her psychology degree helps her cope with “adults throwing tantrums” but hasn’t opened doors to a job yet.
So she didn’t take kindly to being stereotyped by Sen. Ted Cruz as a lazy pothead whose vote could be bought by erasing some of her $53,000 in student loans.
“If you are that slacker barista who wasted seven years in college studying completely useless things, now has loans and can’t get a job, Joe Biden just gave you 20 grand. Like, holy cow, 20 grand,” Cruz said on his podcast, adding that “if you can get off the bong for a minute and go down to the voting station — or just send in your mail-in ballot that Democrats have helpfully sent you — it could drive up turnout.”
To say that Cruz’s comments caught the attention of baristas nationwide would be a demitasse of understatement.
They’re boiling mad. Steamed like a frothy mug of milk.
“I would love to see him clock in for a shift that I work on the weekends,” said Farias, 24.
The minimum wage in Texas is $7.25 an hour. The average barista wage in Texas, according to Ziprecruiter, is $10.54, which works out to $22,000 a year full-time.
Biden announced last week that the federal government will forgive $10,000 to $20,000 in student loans for borrowers with annual income up to $125,000.
Cruz is onto something when he depicts that as a windfall big enough to win the affection of recipients. Where he’s dead wrong, say baristas, is in disparaging them as slackers.
He’s “so disconnected from us and the people and his community,” said Hayley Tepecik, 22, who wakes up every day before 4 a.m. as a shift lead at Foxtrot, an Uptown café.
It’s a full-time job that she juggles with studying rehabilitation as a University of North Texas senior.
She prepares at least four pots of coffee for the first wave of customers. One especially busy morning, she made about 500 drinks.
“It’s insanely busy,” she said, dismayed at the Texas senator’s jabs at some of his own constituents. “These minimum wage workers, these service industry folks. … Those are people behind those counters.”
Tepecik, who has been a barista for nearly seven years, wouldn’t say just how much student debt she’s accrued but said subtracting $10,000 “definitely makes a dent.”
Despite the modest pay, and some grumpy and rude customers, Tepecik likes being around coffee.
“I love sourcing it. I love roasting it. I love an exciting cup of coffee,” she said. “It’s definitely worth it.”
Cruz invoked the hypothetical slacker barista as a way to accuse Biden of engaging in “reverse Robin Hood,” taking money from taxpayers who have no student debt to aid those who do.
“It may be a political masterstroke,” he said, though since only 13% of American adults have student loans, “it is benefiting a relatively small, discrete class. This could play very badly for Joe Biden if the people who are paying for it are pissed off.”
At the White House, Bharat Ramamurti, deputy director of the National Economic Council, called it “galling” to hear student borrowers referred to as slackers.
Biden’s plan gives the most, $20,000, to Pell Grant recipients, he noted. “These are typically people from lower-income families — often first-gen college students — trying to get a degree, and then using their income to help their families as well as pay down their own debt. Slackers?”
At Merit Coffee, the doors open at 6:30 for the morning rush. By then, the first shift has prepared the first three gallons of coffee. They’ll refill those pots every 15 minutes or so.
Mara Wilson, 23, has been a barista there for six months and already has back pain and collapsed arches from standing for long hours, plus wrist pain from the repetitive motions that come with pulling espresso shots.
“While it might seem really fun to pour and make lattes all day, it’s really exhausting,” she said, adding that there’s also a mental toll because “people kind of view their baristas as therapists.”
When Wilson graduated in 2020 from the University of Arkansas with a communications degree, she struggled to find a job in that field.
Biden’s announcement lifted a weight from her shoulders as she realized her entire remaining debt —about $8,000 — would soon be wiped away.
Cruz’s swipe took some of the joy.
“Some of the hardest-working people I know are baristas and in the service industry,” Wilson said. “It was devastating to see that just thrown under the bus for this political agenda.”
